“When you lose, that should be a lesson to you,” Nagai admonished with a scowl as he performed a brutal karate chop on the fender of another parked car.
Then Nagai told Schlegel and the boys it was time to get the hell out of there. He knew as well as they did that scaring the hoods was a great way of attracting more of them. Nagai twisted the keys in the ignition of his Caddy and, as he peeled off into the street, lifted a long iron bar from under his seat and twirled it around in his hand. From their vantage point, the gangsters must have sworn he was wielding a gun. If the objective was not to scare the poor bastards, then at that point they could consider the night a total failure, because fear attracted more teens looking for a fight like moths to a porch light. Nagai screamed up Route 1 at about 80 miles an hour with a car full of ‘hoods on his tail. They pursued the Caddy for nearly forty miles and, only then, finally conceded that the money they put on the wrong man that night was money they never would see again. Neither Harris nor Schlegel ever considered taking weapons of their own into bowling alleys after that, because the incident was such an aberration in their experience.
It was also the last Nagai and the boys would ever see of Federal Lanes. It was not, however, the last time a coterie of young gamblers went out looking for action and instead found themselves on the wrong end of a gangster’s weapon. As 1962 drew to a close, one bowling alley in Brooklyn, New York was emerging as a place where the trouble was at least as plentiful as the treasure. Those who walked the precarious line between the two had stories to tell for the rest of their lives.
2
THE GUNS OF AVENUE M
By 1963, the Brooklyn action bowling scene swirled with rumors about gangsters who packed heat, shylocks who had ways of making sure you did not forget the debt you owed, and con artists who swindled the wrong crowd. Rumor and reality rarely make good bedfellows, of course; most action bowlers who went fishing in Brooklyn made it back home no worse for wear. Others, however, headed home with tales to tell and never dared set foot in the Brooklyn action again. But the promise of a big score overruled any fear the gamblers felt as they headed to Brooklyn for a night of action. Most of the time, they found that action at a place called Avenue M Bowl.
An imposing but otherwise unremarkable edifice, Avenue M Bowl was a two-story bowling alley with lockers and a lounge upstairs. The building stretched from McDonald Avenue to East 2nd Street on Avenue M in Brooklyn, just beside the elevated subway. The owner, Howie Noble, had a face so gnarled with pockmarks that most knew him by his nickname, “Fish Face,” an appropriate moniker given his famous tuna sandwiches served at the lunch counter. Served on thick slices of New York deli rye with chips and a Coke for $0.50, the tuna salad contributed to Fish Face’s reputation as one of the cheapest guys in town. Patrons suspected that the tuna, tasty as it was, consisted largely of a lower-grade fish called bonito.
The building itself served as the most vivid illustration of Fish Face’s frugality. The joyless monotony of its brick exterior, void of even the slightest decorative flourish, amplified the endlessness of its expanse from McDonald Avenue to East 2nd. There was not much more to see inside, where a yawning stretch of blank, white walls deadened the decor. Many bowling alleys display trophy cases, wall murals, plaques, or scoreboards honoring the highest scores ever bowled there. The interior of Avenue M Bowl, however, betrayed a ruthless opposition to such indulgences. Indulgences, after all, cost money, and Fish Face preferred to keep his money where he liked it best—in his pocket. But if the ambiance lacked distinction, the clientele most definitely did not. Avenue M Bowl housed one of the most eclectic collections of characters the action bowling scene ever assembled under one roof, and it was the locus of some of the most unforgettable drama in action bowling history.
Fish Face may have been cheap, but the man knew how to make a buck. Avenue M Bowl, like many New York City bowling alleys at the time, was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fish Face always made a killing on Sunday afternoons, when it seemed as if every family within five miles took their kids out for a few games, and bowling leagues packed the alley most evenings. Late at night, when league bowlers headed home and families had long ago put their kids to bed, the place struggled to rent out a lane or two at a time. Fish Face was not the only proprietor struggling to rent out lanes at the time. Like any bubble bound to burst, proprietors were finding by 1963 that the abundance of bowling alleys built after the automatic pinsetter changed the business forever made it difficult to corner the market of bowlers in a given neighborhood. Bowlers were spreading their patronage across a variety of bowling alleys, all of them close to their homes. Business suffered; bowling alleys began to close down. The Brunswick Corporation repossessed nearly 20,000 pinsetters and more than 15,000 lanes between 1962 and 1966. This misfortune soon proved to be action bowling’s gain.
Bubbles may be bound to burst, but good businessmen are bound to hatch good ideas. And Fish Face had an idea. He spotted talent in a couple regulars, a pair of bowlers known as Mac and Stoop who were as renowned for whoring as they were for bowling. When Mac and Stoop were not out on the prowl for women, they were bowling for the money they needed to do so. Fish Face decided to bill them as the most invincible doubles team New York City had ever seen, daring other local players to challenge them to doubles matches for any amount of money they cared to wager. Mac and Stoop happily obliged, taking on challengers after the last leagues concluded, at about midnight or one in the morning. Soon, word on the street had it that there was this place in Brooklyn where a couple of wise guys thought no one could beat them. That was a surefire way to attract many more wise guys, Fish Face soon discovered. And each of them, of course, ranked his ability at least as highly as Mac and Stoop ranked theirs.
Some of the guys who showed up to challenge them matched Fish Face’s nickname with monikers of their own, names like Bernie Bananas or Freddy the Ox, who owed his nickname to the 6’4” frame into which he stuffed his prodigious girth; or Joe The Kangaroo, who took a three-step approach and then hopped around the approach on one leg after each shot.
One night an action bowler from Brooklyn named Johnny Petraglia was watching Joe the Kangaroo bowl a guy called Frankie the Leaper. They both averaged around 130. Johnny watched them throw some practice shots before the match, Joe hopping around in circles and Frankie falling into a push-up position after each shot and leaping back up to his feet. That was just how Joe and Frankie went about things on the lanes. Nobody asked why; they just gave it a name. There was no eccentricity a good name couldn’t manage.
Then Johnny heard some gambler say, “I think I’ll bet on the Kangaroo tonight. He looks lined up.”
The gambler was dead serious. Johnny laughed hard enough to keep laughing for about a week.
But sometimes the real names were just as inimitable, names that evoked visions of murderers convening in alleyways to determine whose bed would receive the next severed horse head: Sis Montovani, Doc Iandoli, Nunzio Morra, Tony Riccobono. Two of the era’s greatest characters comprised a fearsome doubles team known as Fats and Deacon. They were Fats Carozza and Deacon Deconza, the ones who bowled Ernie Schlegel and Johnny Campbell to a bloody draw in a match that began at dusk and ended at dawn. Those were the days before Schlegel had to look for action outside New York because he ran out of willing challengers back home. Schlegel encountered many other characters then, but none of them blasted the pins more emphatically than the Ox, and Fish Face wanted to capitalize on that.
Fish Face only meant to drum up a little more late-night business. He would soon go down as one of the pioneers of action bowling. By 1963, Avenue M Bowl was attracting the greatest action bowlers from New York City and beyond. They came from all five boroughs. They came from Connecticut. They came from Long Island. They came from New Jersey. They came from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston. They came from everywhere. From custodians to criminals, bankers to bakers, superintendents to salesmen, they came from every station in life in pursuit of the sam
e thing: the rush of adrenaline that promised to come with the next big bet. Gambling, it seemed, was the one unifying passion that dissolved any differences of status or class that resumed the moment they walked out the doors at dawn.
Legions of shouting gamblers waved fistfuls of money at scorekeepers and matchmakers from coast to coast, betting on anything that was betable. Kids flipped coins for money at the lunch counter. Gamblers crowded the locker room with games of craps and cards, following fights and races. And cigar smoke and salty banter thickened the air in the lounge upstairs, where gangsters and shylocks engaged in a number of illicit activities. Those activities included, in no particular order: drinking, cavorting with the revolving door of beautiful women attracted to all that power and money, negotiating loans with dead-broke gamblers who swore they had a fish in their sights, or plotting the demise of other dead-broke gamblers whose debts had grown to such a size that they soon may be just plain dead.
Taking loans you could not repay from the kind of people who made you regret it was only one way gambling could kill you. Sometimes the debauchery at Avenue M Bowl made its way across the street to Danny’s Luncheonette, where one day a married salesman who frequented the bowling alley on his off time bet another guy named Paul that he could drink a fifth of scotch straight down. Paul told him he was nuts, so the salesman walked Paul to a nearby liquor store and showed him how real men drank. He drank a fifth of scotch straight down for $50, a lot of money back then. It was the final demonstration of machismo he ever performed. Walking toward East 2nd Street on his way home, he promptly dropped dead in the street.
But risking your life to make good on a bet was no unusual thing. One day somebody bet a gambler named John McNichols that he could not swim across the Hudson River. McNichols swam it one way. Then the guy bet him he could not swim back, and McNichols, unable to resist, took him up on that bet too. He never made it.
If the gambling did not kill you, sometimes it made you wish it had. Al Rosa was a married twenty-something guy who made more money than he needed by working as a fur cutter. When he moved with his wife to an apartment across the street from Avenue M Bowl, he found just the place for people who made more money than they needed and had an itch to spend it. He also found a place where the vultures of action bowling laid in wait for the uninitiated, and Rosa definitely was among the uninitiated. One such vulture was Bernie Bananas, a fifteen-year-old Jewish kid with glasses and good grades who spent his time away from the lanes with his face in a book. Once Bernie found Avenue M Bowl, though, he was spending a lot more time rolling on the lanes than he was spending with his books. No book or classroom possibly could have furnished Bernie with the street wisdom he gleaned at Avenue M—wisdom he used to victimize Rosa.
Rosa got a taste of action at Avenue M Bowl that kept him coming back every payday. Bernie was as adept at spotting fish as any other action bowler, and was reeling Rosa in. He would clean Rosa out of his paycheck every time. Then he would bowl Rosa yet another match on credit so Rosa would have to pay up the next time he got his paycheck. Whenever Rosa walked into Avenue M Bowl it was like a drunk walking in to tend bar. He had to bowl Bernie again, despite the abundant evidence that he had no chance. Word on the street was that Rosa’s taste for the action cost him his job and, ultimately, his wife. Some might say Bernie ruined him; others might say Rosa ruined himself. Regardless of how Rosa’s paycheck fell into Bernie’s hands or what it cost him in things far more lasting than money, the teenaged Bernie was happy to count his cash and keep it coming. Bernie was a thin rung shy of the upper-echelon of great bowlers. Only a handful of bowlers attained those heights, but Bernie still averaged around 195. His peers knew him for a strange approach in which he looked like some bird descending out of the sky to land on the foul line as he made his shot. But Bernie did not need to be great, even though he was close to it. He just needed to know when he was facing inferior talent—better yet, inferior talent with a loose wallet. That helped Bernie accomplish two things: He did not have to bowl exceptionally well to win; and by not bowling exceptionally well, he preserved the image of a guy who could be beaten. A guy like that could always find willing challengers. With all the bowling practice Rosa had given Bernie by then, his game was more refined than ever, further lessening what slight chance of winning Rosa had.
To another enterprising teenager living on 57th Street and 20th Avenue in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, sneaking out to Avenue M Bowl despite a strict father’s curfew seemed like a perfectly good reason to risk his life. Fifteen-year-old Clifford Nordquist woke up at three A.M. in an anxious sweat, dreaming of the legends he heard about all day at Avenue M Bowl but had never seen for himself. By then, Nordquist was spending so much time at Avenue M Bowl that the place had become his second home. The old timers who kept their eyes on the kid meant only to entertain him with their stories of what they had seen the night before. But to Nordquist, those stories felt more like torture. His father’s ten P.M. curfew fell far too early for him to glimpse the gamblers, gangsters, and shylocks who filled Fish Face’s coffers while the rest of Brooklyn slept. Finally, Nordquist had had enough. He stuffed his blanket with pillows in the hope that it might be enough to allay his father’s suspicions. Just in case, he also left a bullshit note about leaving early to go fishing with buddies. Then he opened the window of his second-floor bedroom, lunged from the sill to the peach tree in the yard, climbed down the tree, and walked the half-mile to Avenue M Bowl in the middle of the night.
The sight he beheld as he neared the corner of Avenue M and McDonald was one he would never forget: Rows of pricey cars, double- and triple-parked, circled the block that by day had tractor trucks and beat-up clunkers at the curb. Flood lights over the front entrance cast a glowing spotlight on a gaggle of gamblers loitering outside, the deafening rattle of the elevated subway strung along McDonald Avenue intruding on their conversation. As Nordquist made his way inside, he found every one of the alley’s twenty-eight lanes teeming with action—bowlers and gamblers shouting bets and challenges from one end of the place to the other. The place was so thick with people he could hardly make his way through the crowd. It was official: Fish Face had turned those sleepy late nights at Avenue M Bowl into a midnight carnival that seemed to attract every degenerate within a thousand-mile radius.
No one who frequented Avenue M Bowl rivaled the degeneracy of a hustler known as Iggy Russo. Most action bowlers were kids in their late teens or early 20s, but Russo was different. He was older, a guy in his middle forties with a wife, kids and a day job. Given Russo’s many rumored transgressions against men who made a hobby of lodging bullets in the temples of those who crossed them, everyone expected Iggy to be found in the Hudson River someday with a boulder tethered to his ankle and a skull freckled with bullet holes. And there was something else everybody knew about Russo: The man never knew a day in his life when he felt the slightest bit of shame—a flaw in his character to which he owed his improbable survival.
Russo contrived the appearance of a no-talent noodle begging to be fleeced of his lunch money. He dressed like a clown, rolling the legs of his pants up to his knees to expose a pair of plaid socks. He wore his black hair closely cropped, and sported a thick pair of glasses and occasionally a duckbill cap. He spoke in a squeaky falsetto many would remember as his most bizarre idiosyncrasy. His reputation as a shyster was so renowned that some suspected the falsetto, too, was part of his act. The standard bowling ball most men used weighed sixteen pounds, as lighter balls were considered to be inferior because they provided less hitting power than a ball of maximum weight. But Russo drove up with a trunk full of balls and pins loaded with lead that made them harder to knock down, just as John Vargo did with the pins in his tournament to make conditions more challenging. If you wanted to bowl Russo for any amount of money, you accepted his props as part of the deal. You played by Russo’s rules.
Russo was not fooling those in the know, however. The good bowlers knew Russo had far more talent tha
n he let on. On a Friday night in 1958, Russo showed up at another Brooklyn bowling alley called Park Circle Lanes, got on the microphone, and challenged anyone in the place to a match. Any bowler with common sense knew that somebody who had the balls to walk into a Brooklyn bowling alley and take on the house had some serious game; no one took him up on his offer. Russo, as always, was there to make money, not to cater to a house full of cowards. So, lacking any takers for a head to head match, he found someone who would take the bet of $100 that he could bowl 120 on the nose. Russo promptly strung together five consecutive strikes in the first five frames—which added up to a total score of 120. A strike is ten points plus the next two balls. So a game that begins with five strikes followed by nothing but gutter balls, which are worth zero points, adds up to thirty points in the first frame, sixty in the second, ninety in the third, one-hundred-and-ten in the fourth and one-hundred-and-twenty in the fifth. No one needed to explain the math to Russo. If the man knew anything, he knew how to keep score in a game of bowling. The other thing he knew was that he could walk into a bowling alley and string together five strikes at will. But that was a flourish of ability he preferred to exhibit only before an audience of disbelievers who paid in cash. He swiped his C-note from the score table and asked his victim if he cared to do any further business.
By the time Russo made Avenue M Bowl the locus of his machinations, he learned that there was a lot more money in hustling than there was in stunning the unsuspecting with his skill. Why bother showing them how good you were if no one dared to bowl you? Russo needed to feign vulnerability; he needed to play that game Ernie Schlegel called “the spider and the fly.” Russo would prove to be one of the city’s most able spiders. He became a “dumper”—the epithet reserved for bowlers who secretly bet against themselves and then bowled badly on purpose to score some easy dough. Russo hardly was the only dumper in the action bowling scene; he just happened to be the most brazen and notorious of them all. The specter of dumpers soon would imperil action bowling as it was known, as bowlers tired of trying to discern between gamblers and crooks. If your opponent missed a spare, you wanted to believe he missed it because he threw an errant shot, not because he secretly was scheming to bowl badly on purpose for his own personal gain. You wanted to believe that the difference between an action match and a boxing match in the 1960s was that the action match was not fixed. As dumpers eroded that notion, they eroded an era. Even Ernie Schlegel regarded Russo as a bad apple that threatened to ruin the batch, the kind of con man who might have driven away many fish who thought, thanks to Russo’s shenanigans, that the whole action bowling scene was rigged. But on one night in particular—the night witnesses would tell about for the rest of their lives—Russo, for once, proved too smart for his own good.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 4